New Horizons: 2011 health care provider report

The Center for Transforming Healthcare was established in 2009 as a separate 501 (c) 3 not-for-profit affiliate of The Joint Commission. We talked with Joint Commission President Dr. Mark Chassin about how the Center is working with hospitals and health systems to address their most pressing problems in quality of care and patient safety.

EY: How did the Center for Transforming Healthcare come to be?

Mark Chassin: What we heard from our customers was this: knowing what the problems were wasn’t enough. They wanted to know how to solve them. This led to the creation of the Center and its mission to address high-impact, industry-wide issues.

EY: How do you disseminate what you’ve found to your health care customers?

Mark Chassin: We’re delivering solutions to customers in three ways. First, we have created an online information portal where accredited organizations can log in and engage in step-by step, problem-solving processes. Second, our surveyors, who conduct over 7,000 surveys a year in the US, are actively involved in coaching and educating, infusing what they have learned from the organizations they have visited. Third, we have created a leading-practice library that is widely available to our accredited customers.

EY: In the quest to instill a culture of safety, what should board members be asking their CEOs?

Mark Chassin: One of the most effective questions board members can ask is this: “Tell me about the most recent close call we had here at the hospital — what did we learn from it, and what did we do to fix the problem?”

Health care organizations will need to look beyond the known to navigate the new.

Perhaps no US industry stands more today at the proverbial “fork in the road” than health care. The passage in 2010 of health care reform has brought the industry to a divergence of paths.

One path is the old way of doing things, marked by separate silos of health care delivery, treatment plans often driven by tradition, and a system that focuses on sickness care. The other is a new way, designed to increase quality and safety through more integration, greater efficiencies and a focus on wellness.

We take a closer look at the new health care path in our annual edition of New Horizons.

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